Kent Desormeaux rides Exaggerator (right) to win the 141st Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.
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Bonded by their prowess for getting the most out of race horses, siblings Keith and Kent Desormeaux have a relationship that can best be described as professional.
“I haven’t thought about my brother one time”, Keith said after the race. The rivalry or the fun, it’s there but it doesn’t matter who’s in the race. The rain stopped for most of the day, much to the delight of the record crowd of 135,256, but a steady light rain began an hour before the race. “I’m gonna think about a beer for a little while and I might get to him later”.
“We were here together a couple years”.
The brothers called their mother, Brenda, who was the ecstatic star of a Saturday office party at the nonprofit she runs in Lafayette, La.
The third leg of the Triple Crown series will be in the Belmont Stakes in NY on June 11. Nyquist faded and pulled in third behind Cherry Wine.
The opening quarter mile (400m) of the 1900m event was run in 22.1 seconds – the fastest in the history of the famous race.
“You know, they’re not machines and being 8-for-8 we kept thinking this horse was never going to lose”, said Doug O’Neill, trainer of Nyquist. But post-strangulation, I started worrying, ‘Why in the world is he so close to the lead.’ By the far turn, we were already just three or four lengths off, and I looked over at my girlfriend and said, ‘I hope he’s not asking him to be there.’ In other words, I hope the horse has done all of this on his own.
He said after the race that Exaggerator was always the biggest threat to his previously undefeated horse, and he credited the Desormeauxs for producing a “monstrous” performance from their gifted challenger. Everyone before the race expected things to come down to Nyquist and Exaggerator.
The owner of Justin Squared is Zayat Stables, who also owned American Pharaoh, last year’s Triple Crown champion. For Keith, 49, it represented the culmination of a long, slow ascent.
However, the outcome may have been determined more by the decisions of the respective jockeys than by the weather.
“He broke very well again”, Kent added.
“So the moral of the story is, trust your brother?” a reporter asked. We did. They didn’t.
The $250,00 Dixie Stakes, a 1 1/16-mile turf race, the 12th race of Preakness Day, was captured by Takeover Target who closed from the outside to win by a neck. Keith had not saddled a horse in the Derby or Preakness before this spring. The race is 1 3/16 miles.
“For the abbreviations I’ve had in previous starts, I had a dream trip today”, Kent Desormeaux said. “I was able to let him inch forward and let him gain to the lead slowly and quietly”. It wasn’t a matter of if but when.
Exaggerator, whose odds were 5-2 in the minutes before the Preakness, had proven his mettle in sloppy conditions in winning the Santa Anita Derby in April.
“I’m proud of my horse, proud of the jockey”, Romans said. It was easy to see, though, that while Nyquist was battling longshot Uncle Lino for position for the first ¾ mile, Exaggerator was saving ground and energy for the finish.
“We have to play that up as horse racing aficionados”, he said.
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Another Triple Crown dream was dashed, but a rivalry between Exaggerator and Nyquist just got a lot more interesting.
